Getting Started: What to Consider When Launching a DTC Site

A direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel can give you more control over your brand and help grow your sales. However given the labor intensive process involved it's important to set expectations and ensure you set you and your team up for success. Let's look at three key areas so you can successfully launch your brand with an improved DTC channel.

Mitigating Channel Conflict

One of the first things to consider is to look at your DTC channel differently than how you've previously viewed it. No doubt you've experienced some channel conflict in the past if you've ever used direct-to-consumer marketing before.

Selling directly to the consumer can sometimes make retailers, wholesalers, dealers, and sales reps a bit unhappy. On the other hand, if you let retailers handle all distribution, then your brand can suffer in the process.

Platforms are available to help find solutions to channel conflict. Your solution is to focus directly on making the customer happy. When you do, it's going to make you and your business partners happy when a prospect converts or becomes a loyal customer.

Also, by creating exclusive products, you'll increase sales while closely tying the sales in with your brand. Offering indirect discounts additionally helps avoid any pricing wars. Product giveaways and creating product bundles are good ways to make this work.

Gathering Insights Directly From Your Buyers

While you market directly to consumers, it pays to know what it is they like about your products (and what they don't).

Without insights and feedback, you'll only be taking guesses on whether your products truly resonate with consumer needs.

The way forward here is to find a platform allowing consumers to send you feedback so you can thoroughly analyze these thoughts. You'll want to look at things like product page performance, how your SEO is performing, buy box monitoring, compliance, and any other actionable insights.

Finding a platform that gives you these metrics without waiting means you can take action now so you don't waste time. Once you find out something isn't working, changing content will make all the difference in making your sales stronger.

Optimizing Your Go-to-Market Process

After finding a platform able to manage your DTC channel content, you also want it to help improve behind-the-scenes sales/marketing team skills.

Many of the above features will help do this, though your team will also appreciate a platform keeping all content in one place for easy management.

Having digital asset management also strengthens their skills by being able to import or transform digital assets without complication. Forcing your team to take extra steps toward content management will only slow them down and lead to more work overload.

Using commerce-driven workflows help as well in speeding up the process of time to market and in improving sales. Simplifying things at this level will up the confidence level of your internal team and give them time to hone in on other details they may otherwise overlook.